Intrada's latest CD (and apparently final release of 2013) is the first-ever release of Alan Silvestri's score for BLOWN AWAY, the 1994 thriller pitting bomb squad officer Jeff Bridges against IRA veteran Tommy Lee Jones, which was the third consecutive film Silvestri scored for director Stephen Hopkins, following Predator 2 and Judgment Night.

Varese Sarabande has just announced six new limited edition CD Club releases, which will begin shipping in early January -- STAR TREK NEMESIS: THE DELUXE EDITION, a two-disc, greatly expanded version of Jerry Goldsmith's final score for the franchise and the final film starring the Next Generation crew, pitting Picard and the gang against an evil Romulan clone played by Tom Hardy, a decade before he menaced Gotham in The Dark Knight Rises (with this release, Star Trek Into Darkness is now the only Trek feature score which has not received an expanded re-release); THE ABYSS: THE DELUXE EDITION, a two-disc, expanded edition of Alan Silvestri's score for James Cameron's Oscar-winning 1989 underwater sci-fi epic; the first CD release of Laurence Rosenthal's exciting, romantic score to BRASS TARGET (previously released on LP by Varese, at the time their very first release of a new score), a conspiracy thriller about the allegedly accidental death of General George Patton; and three straight re-releases of out-of-print CDs, James Horner's VIBES (one of the first and rarest from the original Varese CD Club), Michael Kamen's SUSPECT, and Jerry Goldsmith's RUNAWAY: THE DELUXE EDITION.

During Christmas week, the UK branch of Sony is planning to release a handful of new scores on CD that are currently only receiving download releases in the U.S.: FREE BIRDS (Dominic Lewis), KILL YOUR DARLINGS (Nico Muhly), OUT OF THE FURNACE (Dickon Hinchliffe) and THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (Theodore Shapiro).

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced the latest Golden Globe nominations, including the following music-related categories:

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

ALL IS LOST - Alex Ebert
THE BOOK THIEF - John Williams
GRAVITY - Steven Price
MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM - Alex Heffes
12 YEARS A SLAVE - Hans Zimmer

December 13 - David Raksin begins recording his score to The Reformer and the Redhead (1949)
December 13 - Dimitri Tiomkin begins recording his score for Land of the Pharaohs (1954)
December 13 - Harry Gregson-Williams born (1961)
December 13 - Miles Goodman begins recording his score for Dunston Checks In (1995)
December 14 - John Lurie born (1952)
December 14 - Alfred Newman begins recording his score for Hell and High Water (1953)
December 14 - Ron Jones records his score for the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Defector" (1989)
December 15 - Gone With the Wind premieres (1939)
December 15 - The Man with the Golden Arm opens in New York (1955)
December 16 - Lud Gluskin born (1898)
December 16 - Noel Coward born (1889)
December 16 - Camille Saint-Saens died (1921)
December 16 - Adam Gorgoni born (1963)
December 16 - Jerry Goldsmith begins recording his rejected Timeline score (2002)
December 17 - Leo Erdody born (1888)
December 17 - Don Ellis died (1978)
December 18 - Ron Jones records his score for the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Datalore" (1987)
December 19 - Galt MacDermot born (1928)
December 19 - Herbert Stothart begins recording his score for Northwest Passage (1939)
December 19 - The Thief of Bagdad premieres in London (1940)
December 19 - Fred Karlin begins recording his score to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1973)
December 19 - Michel Magne died (1984)
December 19 - Roger Webb died (2002)

DID THEY MENTION THE MUSIC?

THE ARMSTRONG LIE - David Kahne

"His filmmaking is strenuously alpha, too. Like all Gibney's documentaries, 'The Armstrong Lie' is fast-paced, aggressively stylized, and juiced by a driving score. That fits, but perhaps we should offer thanks that the tribute film never panned out: Not too deeply buried in the press notes is the casual but staggering disclosure that Armstrong would have taken a cut of the movie's returns in return for 'unprecedented' access."

Ella Taylor, NPR

MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM - Alex Heffes

"There’s too much life in Mandela’s 700-page book to condense even to a snoozy 146 minutes, but Nicholson and Chadwick dutifully hit the bullet points anyway, reducing Mandela to a simple avatar of courage and peace, held aloft by Alex Heffes’ soaring score."

Scott Tobias, The Dissolve

"Most curiously, 'Long Walk to Freedom' is terrified of the very thing that defined Mandela -- politics -- though the film does stick its neck out in detailing the separation of Nelson (Idris Elba) and Winnie (Naomie Harris) in the early 1990s; their disintegrating relationship turns the political into the personal in striking, concise fashion. But bold performance or not, you can see history weighing heavily on Elba’s shoulders (in later scenes as an older man, you can see the makeup, too). Chadwick, meanwhile, tears through the decades at lightning speed and leans on sweeping cameras, overinsistent music and a ragbag of visual styles."

Dave Calhoun, Time Out New York

"Making 'Lee Daniels’ The Butler' seem positively avant-garde by comparison, director Justin Chadwick ('The Other Boleyn Girl') and screenwriter William Nicholson's CliffsNotes version of Mandela’s nearly 700-page memoir never opts for a light touch when a sledgehammer will do, slathered in golden sunsets, inspirational platitudes and John Barry-esque strings that will doubtless make a certain contingent of awards voters sit up and beg for more. But for all its failings, there is one thing about 'Long Walk to Freedom' that can’t be denied: Idris Elba gives a towering performance, a Mandela for the ages."

Scott Foundas, Variety

NEBRASKA - Mark Orton

"As a road movie in a classic tradition, 'Nebraska,' with an exquisite score by Mark Orton, has a stated destination and an unstated goal. Getting to that sweepstakes office is a trip and a half, punctuated by encounters with such pungent characters as Stacy Keach's Ed Pegram, a smiling brute who's alive to the possibilities of Woody's putative fortune, and Angela McEwan's Peg Nagy, an other-worldly pixie who runs Hawthorne's little newspaper and dispatches a boy on a bicycle to photograph Woody for the article she intends to write about him. But getting to the goal of reconciliation is what carries father and son along, and leads to a vehicular climax that's entirely in keeping with what has gone before—ineffably tender, entirely unexpected and quietly thrilling."

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

"Neither tone meshes well with the other (it's like watching two different films, one composed of sugar the other of arsenic, blended coarsely together). Plus, there's a special place in hell reserved for Mark Orton's maudlin score, which obsequiously indicates every emotion you're supposed to feel, even as it sticks in your head with its inane, elevator-muzak repetitiveness. Payne can only go up from this misfire. One hopes."

Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

"Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael's monochrome images capture the emptiness of a small town Americana that has echoes of 'Paper Moon,' while Mark Orton's rich score elaborates on the elegant world until it grows redundant. The atmosphere, however, never quite synchs with the hopelessness engulfing these characters' lives. Instead, Payne pities them to a great degree."

Eric Kohn, IndieWIRE

"The music too, is initially sweet and welcome but as the film wears on the 'heartland America' vibe starts to grate in its heavy-handedness -- one particular musical motif becomes especially insistent as time goes on, and if we were feeling unkind we could liken its use to having someone in the seat next to you repeat the word 'bittersweet' in your ear ad infinitum, in case you weren’t too sure how you should be feeling."

Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

"Woody joins his elderly brothers for a reunion, which largely consists of the old men sitting in their plaid shirts in front of the television; they trade monosyllables without looking one another’s way. Nature or nurture? Their fine, weathered features (Payne uses many nonactors) and composer Mark Orton’s stoic, minor-key banjo and strings give them a dignity that turns an easy sight gag into something more mysterious."

David Edelstein, New York

"Barely speaking, father and son make their way across Wyoming and South Dakota, with a side trip to Mount Rushmore. ('A bunch of rocks,' shrugs an unimpressed Woody.) Their road trip unrolls in a leisurely fashion -- lots of shots of gas stations, snowy plains, and grazing bison -- but with stunning black-and-white cinematography by Phedon Papamichael and a wistful fiddle score by Mark Orton, its contemplative pace feels just right."

Dana Stevens, Slate

"And so begins Woody's road odyssey, shot by the gifted Phedon Papamichael in glorious widescreen black and white and scored by Mark Orton with a fiddler's ear for the sharp and the tender."

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"In addition to Papamichael’s camerawork, the plaintive guitar-and-fiddle score by Mark Orton is another craft standout."

Scott Foundas, Variety

"Phedon Papamichael’s handsome monochromatic cinematography is neither ostentatious nor overly gritty, just forthright and elegantly composed, while Mark Orton’s lovely score, which often employs just a guitar in combination with an array of individual second instruments, provides a constant source of pleasure."

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter

OUT OF THE FURNACE - Dickon Hinchliffe

"The powerful surge of inevitability built up in the first half transfers into a decidedly different film in the second; it becomes less of a character piece, and more of an obtuse thematic effort that too often feels like it's masking its rougher edges in ambiguity (and an admittedly excellent Dickon Hinchliffe score)."

Charlie Schmidlin, The Playlist

"The geographical truth of 'Furnace' jumps off the screen, the dingy corner bars and dark rural corners where you don’t want to be stuck without a friend. I’m also a fan of Dickon Hinchliffe’s string-heavy score and its shifts from longing to foreboding."

Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

"Cooper's film has every element that bro tragedy requires: decent-souled yet emotionally constipated men toiling in working-class professions; a criminal subplot that leads to a grave offense and a desire for vengeance; a sense of an old order passing and a new, diminished one taking its place; and on the soundtrack, a string-laden orchestral score, interspersed with power ballads that sound as if they're being moaned by a man in pain. Serious or silly, this movie should have been irresistibly grand and propulsive."

Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com

"Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi captures the contrasts as the film shifts between the languishing town and the natural beauty of rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is all set to the backwoods chords of 'Winter's Bone' composer Dickon Hinchliffe, with Eddie Vedder contributing a poignant new rendition of the Pearl Jam hit 'Release.'"

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

"Licensed for the first time for a movie soundtrack, Pearl Jam’s 'Release' (in both its original and a newly re-recorded version) bookends the film with Eddie Vedder’s wailing, soulful refrain, while composer Dickon Hinchliffe ('Winter’s Bone') provides the moody original score."